Macbook Air 13' 2015 configuration

[RadimV]

I am thinking of buying a new Macbook Air 13,3" 2,2GHz / 8GB / 256GB (2015).
The Macbook will be used at home for certain purposes such as developing iOS, Mac OS X applications, RAW (24 MB) photo editing, browsing the internet, no gaming, no video editing application - I hope .
At the beginning I wanted to buy Macbook Pro 13' 2014/or 2015, at the same price as Air 13', but after reading the anti-reflective coating issues on retina, I have decided to take Air 13'. I don't know whether problem remains unsolved - rMBP 2014/2015. Maybe I shouldn't try to meet trouble halfway, I don't know.

regarding MBA 13', I would like to know the difference between an Intel i7 and i5 processor, especially for my purposes, should I go for i7 ? For a photo editing I going to use an external monitor NEC PA241W.

any comments will be appreciated

 

[paulmac]

...you should go for a computer with more memory than 8GB. Specially if you are not going to carry it around too much. Macbook air really needs a memory update...at least up to 16GB...

 

[Meister]

For what you are doing even the base model will work fine.

 

[motrek]

For what you are doing even the base model will work fine.

Unless the photo editing will involve several layers... that's almost the only time I've run out of memory on my 4GB Mac Mini, is when I was editing some high-resolution graphics with several (8-10?) different layers in Photoshop.

If you're just going to be changing the brightness, contrast, etc. of some photos then 4GB should be fine.

As for the Intel i7 vs. i5 processor, it's a small percentage difference. Maybe around 20%. In other words, the i7 is a little faster but it's definitely not a game-changer like some people seem to think. You can decide if 20% is worth it to you.

 

[RadimV]

Unless the photo editing will involve several layers... that's almost the only time I've run out of memory on my 4GB Mac Mini, is when I was editing some high-resolution graphics with several (8-10?) different layers in Photoshop.

If you're just going to be changing the brightness, contrast, etc. of some photos then 4GB should be fine.

As for the Intel i7 vs. i5 processor, it's a small percentage difference. Maybe around 20%. In other words, the i7 is a little faster but it's definitely not a game-changer like some people seem to think. You can decide if 20% is worth it to you.

regarding the layers, it happens only rarely, I usually change the contrast, brightness, etc., but I use Nik filters most frequently.
Perhaps I forgot to mention one important thing, I prefer/like a quiet laptop. I had MBP 15' with dVGA Late 2011 a couple of years ago, was overheating, and fan noise.
As regard i7, I was told by Apple store that in some cases i7 behaves as quad core processor, virtually, but of course not physically .

 

[motrek]

regarding the layers, it happens only rarely, I usually change the contrast, brightness, etc., but I use Nik filters most frequently.
Perhaps I forgot to mention one important thing, I prefer/like a quiet laptop. I had MBP 15' with dVGA Late 2011 a couple of years ago, was overheating, and fan noise.
As regard i7, I was told by Apple store that in some cases i7 behaves as quad core processor, virtually, but of course not physically .

Apple wasn't technically wrong, but that's a misleading thing for them to say.

All MBA processors (i5s and i7s) since 2011 have hyperthreading. This does make a dual-core processor appear to have four cores. But both processors have it. The i7 is really virtually identical to the i5 except for somewhat higher clock speeds. Again, it's a small percentage difference, not a game changer.

As for being quiet, your CPU circa 2011 was probably an Ivy Bridge. With Haswells and Broadwells, Intel has made enormous improvements to CPU power efficiency, which is why MBAs now get 9+ hours of battery life. The CPUs (fans) generally run very quietly with rare exceptions, e.g., when playing video games or transcoding videos.

Quick explanation of hyperthreading: when you run a program on a modern processor core, some of the core's resources are idle (on a per-nanosecond basis). That's performance left on the table. So in an effort to utilize these idle resources, the core pretends to be two cores, so it can get two streams of instructions that will hopefully use more of its resources. The performance improvement you can get from hyperthreading in practice ranges anywhere between a small slowdown to maybe 80% faster, with a typical improvement around 10-20%.